HP Enhances Network Storage Services Offerings

HP announces five new services for optimizing and managing heterogeneous storage environments, along with enhancements to its Pay per Use solution for HP StorageWorks XP disk arrays, which allows customers to pay based on actual storage capacity usage.

HP has announced five new services for optimizing and managing heterogeneous storage environments, along with enhancements to the company's Pay per Use solution for HP StorageWorks XP disk arrays, which allows customers to pay based on actual storage capacity usage.

"HP sees storage-related services as a key growth area in their overall services effort," says Doug Chandler, program director for Storage and Data Management Services at IDC. "Compaq had a pretty solid story to tell in this space before the merger, so that's something that HP picked up as part of the merger. Customers are looking to get the most out of the storage capacity they've already installed, so that's the focus of most of these services. And the data management and retention issue has become a hot one, due to the headlines about e-mail coming into play in several high-profile court cases, as well as regulations that specify how data, including e-mail, must be retained."

"These offerings help to round out HP's storage services portfolio," Chandler continues. "Nothing groundbreaking here, but these services address some key customer concerns pertaining to storage," such as business recovery and continuity, storage optimization, data management for e-mail archiving, and sanitization. The e-mail archiving service, relating to Legato software, was announced earlier in the month.

"Increasing agility and return on IT investment will continue to be critical business imperatives moving forward," states Gary Wright, vice president, network storage services, HP Services. "HP, with its Adaptive Enterprise Strategy, is strongly positioned to help companies create more business value with services such as these."

Storage has become "the heart of IT," adds Wright, "because it is very critical to IT infrastructure and the whole business."

Issues like return on investment, managing multi-vendor environments, and disaster recovery are driving the need for better storage management tools, according to Wright. And with more than 2,000 SANs implemented -- "more than anyone else" -- Wright says HP is positioned to deliver those services.

Wright claims companies using the new HP services report they have improved performance, for example, by 30%; reduced the need for storage administrators by more than 75%; and increased SLA delivery by 100%.

The HP Data Replication Solution Service lets customers manage and control data replication by implementing a customized, integrated, and operational data replication solution using HP Continuous Access and Business Copy technologies.

With the service, customers receive an accelerated return on IT investment and benefit from a simplified solution that can be scaled up or down based on business needs, according to HP. The service delivers enhanced availability and disaster recovery protection, and better aligns business with IT.

The HP Data Sanitization Service is designed to eliminate the possibility that sensitive data can be retrieved or reconstructed from de-commissioned storage devices. It addresses this potentially serious yet often overlooked security risk by removing confidential data from hardware after system upgrades, consolidations, and storage platform migrations.

HP says it is the only vendor that currently provides data sanitization as a standard service offering. HP Data Sanitization Service is available for UNIX and Windows-based computing platforms using HP StorageWorks disk-based storage devices, starting at $7,000 per terabyte.

HP Storage Area Management Solution Service

HP says the Storage Area Management Solution Service lets companies have better control of their increasingly complex storage environments while increasing scalability, availability, and flexibility. It does this by providing expert project management, design activities, environmental analysis, and business process and reporting needs analyses.

HP Services storage consultants leverage their in-depth knowledge of the HP OpenView Storage Area Manager -- an integrated suite of storage area network management software products that support HP and non-HP storage devices -- to deliver a tailored solution for each customer.

The service ranges from $10,000 to $100,000.

Pay per Use Solution for HP StorageWorks XP Disk Arrays

HP's Pay per Use solution on HP StorageWorks XP 128 and 1024 disk arrays lets customers pay a fixed monthly fee plus a variable fee that is based on metering the actual usage of their disk storage systems.

Updates to the solution include a refined pricing model and enhanced metering methodology. Designed to scale right along with a company's IT environment, HP says the solution takes the guesswork out of forecasting anticipated storage needs, aligns costs with storage usage, and eliminates large up-front storage investments.

The Pay per Use solution for StorageWorks XP is an offering in HP's On Demand solutions portfolio and is delivered through HP Financial Services. HP claims it was the first company to introduce a pay-per-use selling model.

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